Year: 2007

The BBC have announced a new series which will investigate the scientific basis of three ‘alternative therapies’: reflexology, hypnosis and meditation – except that two of them, hypnosis and meditation, are well-supported scientifically validated treatments.

In fact, systematic reviews have found hypnosis to be an effective treatment for reducing nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy, distress during childbirth, irritable bowel syndrome, and needle pain in children, to name but a few. That’s not counting the numerous studies on the cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis and hypnotisability.

Similarly, mindfulness meditation-based therapies have been researched extensively and found to be useful in a large number of conditions.

In fact, they are one of the best treatments to prevent relapse in people who have already had several depressive episodes in the past.

Both hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapy are used in Britain’s National Health Service and the Royal Society of Medicine has its own dedicated hypnosis section.

Although it’s probably true to say that meditation and hypnosis are also used inappropriately by quacks, so are vitamins, painkillers and exercise, none of which are thought of as ‘alternative’.

The measure of a treatment is not only what it does, but what it’s used for. Antibiotics aren’t an alternative therapy unless you’re trying to use them to cure cancer.

Presumably, the BBC’s next series on alternative music will feature The Rolling Stones and U2 (in contrast, I’m guessing reflexology is the Menswear of medicine).

Link to odd BBC programme announcement.

Wired News has a brief article on how ageing affects the brain and what are the current best-supported practices to keep our mental edge as we progress into our senior years.

The article discusses ways in which the brain overcomes the natural decline in function and how this process can be supported.

Despite the current interest in ‘brain training’, which in its current version seems to have a moderate effect at best, the most effective technique seems to be physical exercise (although a combination of both may well be the best option of course).

Exercise is known both to boost mood and maintain the blood supply network to the brain, both of which are known to be crucial to mental functioning.

What’s the advice for now?

Physical exercise is the best-proven prescription so far, the scientists agreed. Memory improved when 72-year-olds started a walking program three days a week, and sophisticated scans showed their brains’ activity patterns started resembling those of younger people.

Then there’s the “use-it-or-lose-it” theory, that people with higher education, more challenging occupations and enriched social lives build more cognitive reserve than couch potatoes.

It’s never too late to start building up that reserve, said Columbia University neuroscientist Yaakov Stern. But, “the question is how. What is the recipe?”

Everything from doing crossword puzzles to various computer-based brain-training programs has been touted, but nothing is yet proven to work. Johns Hopkins University has a major government-funded study under way called the “Experience Corps,” where older adults volunteer to tutor school students 15 hours a week, to see if such long-term stimulation maintains the elders’ brains.

What about medication? Companies have been reluctant to test side effect-prone drugs in an otherwise healthy aging brain, but scientists cited animal studies suggesting low-dose estrogen and drugs that might mimic or ramp up brain signaling are promising possibilities.

Link to Wired article ‘Doctors Discuss Theories on Aging Brains’.

New Scientist has an article and video interviews with several transhumanists who are attempting to make the human brain immortal by reversing neural ageing, implanting stem cells and uploading the mind to a computer.

Transhumanism is a movement that aims to enhance the limits of human capabilities through techology.

The ideas stretche from the reasonable and shortly to be possible, to the outlandish and barely conceivable.

Unlike some other slightly left-field movements, it’s got some heavy-weight scientists attached to it. This means it’s rarely dull and at the very least it’s thought-provoking, even when it does stretch to the outer limits of sci-fi philosophy.

The New Scientist article discusses the possibilities of escaping death by developing the cutting edge of biotech.

Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough – a few decades perhaps – the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world’s “most dangerous idea”.

If you think these fears are unreasonable, have a look at some of the Marvin Minsky quotes later in the article. He obviously wants to be robot overlord when SkyNet becomes sentient.

Link to New Scientist article ‘The plan for eternal life’.
Link to video interview with Sandberg, de Grey and Bostrom.

Last weekend, a group of mental health professionals took part in a study as part of the art science collaboration Walking Here and There. It’s a joint effort between myself and artist Simon Pope, and like earlier stages of the project, it questions how we use art and science to construct meaning out of memory, location and psychosis.

The study looked at the influence of recall on walking behaviour, drawing on an existing paradigm in psychosis research.

But the experiment was also designed to give the participants an experience common to psychiatric inpatients: feeling disoriented, having their experience of the hospital affected by their memories of being outside, and being experimented on.

The experiment was designed, reviewed and ethically approved, with the scientific aim of looking at how walking is affected by recall via differences in hemispheric activation.

Participants were asked to walk a route around Ruskin Park, a tranquil green area near to the Maudsley Hospital which inpatients often visit on breaks from the ward. Later, while blindfolded and earplugged, participants were asked to recall aloud their stroll around the park while attempting to keep to a midline in a basement corridor of the hospital.

A similar approach has found that people with higher levels of schizotypy (subclinical psychosis-like experiences) and people given the dopamine boosting drug L-DOPA, are more likely to veer to the left on this task, reflecting increased right hemisphere activation.

Recall is known to preferentially activate the right hemisphere, so we might expect greater left veering during the task.

However, the study was located both to communicate some of the subjective experience of psychiatric inpatients to Maudsley staff, and also as a commentary on mental health care, as patients often find their time in the park more therapeutic than the disorienting environment of the hospital.

By doing this, we’re also attempting to question whether experiments can be meaningful beyond their data.

Occasionally, the sheer existence of a study has profound implications for society. Experiments such as Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment or Milgram’s conformity experiment were landmarks in reforming the ethics of participation owing to the subjective experience of the participants and their attempt to study the extremes of human behaviour.

With the increased ethical scrutiny into research, perhaps experiments are now only valued for their data, and participants only for their behaviour.

An earlier phase of the project, Gallery Space Recall, was a gallery exhibition without any objects. Visitors, largely artists and art curators, were asked to recall, while walking through the gallery, their experience of an earlier exhibition.

And while the walking experiment was designed to comment on mental health care, one of the main themes for Simon was that Gallery Space Recall critiqued the art world and its obsession with saleable objects and the prestige of gallery spaces.

But in terms of the experience, the gallery visitors were asked to value their subjective experience as a key component in the piece, rather than relying on any objective aspects of an artwork.

In the walking experiment, we attempted to do something similar, but rather than attempting to highlight the role of subjective experience in art, we focused on the subjective aspects of science.

We’re debating what to do with the experimental data, and we think we might bury it – to create an exhibition without objects and an experiment without data.

Link to Walking Here and There.

The New York Times reports on a study shortly to be published in Nature Medicine that has developed a blood test that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s disease with 90% accuracy.

One of the difficulties with Alzheimer’s disease, and indeed most forms of dementia, is that by the time the characteristic mental difficulties are noted, the disease has already been affecting the brain for some time.

It would be useful if these changes could be detected way before they started to affect memory, attention and so on, so the clinical team can intervene as soon as possible.

To this end, the researchers looked at the levels of various proteins in the blood of a number of older people who had ‘mild cognitive impairment‘ – detectable but relatively slight mental difficulties for their age.

Each participant was followed up so the team knew whether these initial cognitive difficulties developed into Alzheimer’s disease or not.

A statistical analysis looked at which of 120 proteins most distinguished the two groups and a group of 18 key proteins were identified which could be used to diagnose the groups with 90% accuracy.

Interestingly, the protein analysis suggested that Alzheimer’s may be linked to problems with inflammation, blood growth, neuroprotection, neural growth, waste cell removal and energy regulation.

The clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is based on mental difficulties and possible brain scan evidence. However, it can’t be diagnosed for certain until the brain is examined after the person has died.

In this case, an additional important step was completed by examining some of the post-mortem brains to confirm the diagnosis and, reassuringly, the blood test retained its accuracy.

It seems that this test is only useful in picking up people who are already developing the disorder but don’t show any symptoms yet, so it can’t be used on young people to determine who will develop the disorder later in life.

Link to NYT article ‘Progress Cited in Alzheimer‚Äôs Diagnosis’.
Link to write-up from Nature News.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

Neurophilosophy has found some fantastic footage of someone controlling their Second Life avatar using a brain-computer interface developed by the Biomedical Engineering Lab from Keio University in Japan.

From watching the video, navigation is certainly quite possible, if not a little awkward. One of the striking things is that the person cannot seem to be able to easily move forward and change direction at the same time.

Presumably, this is quite a tricky problem for a brain-computer interface (BCI), as they work by converting electrical patterns from the brain into keyboard responses.

While your average Halo player will be able to combine key presses to maybe move, change direction, shoot and lock at the same time, it’s difficult both for the BCI to learn to distinguish each of these commands, as well as for the person to train themselves to think in the ‘right way’ so the brain generates distinct enough patterns for each combination.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see quite how far the technology has gone. A fairly simply rig now allows control within a consumer environment.

Not quite The Matrix but still a useful development for a technology that might seriously benefit people with paralysis.

Link to Neurophilosophy with brain-computer interface / Second Life footage.